Was there “new birth” in the Old Testament?
If since Adam we’re all born spiritually dead, how can the new birth not occur in the OT? What am I misunderstanding?
—VIA EMAIL
Response: God definitely gave the OT believers the faith to believe and counted them as righteous. He absolutely gave them the ability to know and to love Him and not to be spiritually dead, unable to serve Him.
What the OT saints did NOT receive was the seal of the Holy Spirit. The permanently indwelling Holy Spirit was new with the new covenant. Jesus even told His disciples:
“I will ask the Father, and He will give you another Helper, that He may be with you forever; [that is] the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it does not see Him or know Him, [but] you know Him because He abides with you and will be in you.”—John 14:16, 17
Notice that it is Jesus saying that He “abides with you” (present tense as He spoke) but “will be in you” (future tense).
God definitely gave believers His help in believing and serving Him, but they did not have the new covenant gift of completed reconciliation that is the consequence of Jesus’ death, burial, resurrection, and ascension. The account of the disciples in Acts 1 and of Pentecost in Acts 2 are the first examples of believers receiving the Holy Spirit who seals and indwells them (Eph. 1:13, 14).
The details of belief in the OT are not spelled out, but we can know from Jesus’ own words and from the accounts of Pentecost and of Paul’s writings that the church is a completely NEW phenomenon. Only believers in the Lord Jesus are indwelled by God Himself permanently
The idea of “new birth” is not named in the Old Testament. God did say to Israel that He wanted them to circumcise their hearts, and that figure of speech is used in the NT to describe belief and trust, but the permanent indwelling of the Holy Spirit is a strictly new covenant phenomenon.
Daughter Wants To Marry an Adventist
Our daughter has gotten involved with a Seventh-day Adventist whom she says she wants to marry, and he has asked to marry her. My husband—her dad—told him no because we still had some questions. We have tried to talk to her about all our concerns, and I really don’t think she has sought counsel apart from him and probably his family or his pastor.
She appears to believe him and what he says, which is that Jesus died for his sins and that his church doesn’t follow Ellen G White. However, he does believe in soul sleep, annihilation, and that if you were saved and then rejected the Holy Spirit and walked away, you could lose your salvation. When we talked to both of them yesterday, we asked him a lot of questions based on a lot of information about the Adventist church and how he believed. He is very good at quickly articulating his belief with Scripture.At the same time, he said, “I don’t want to overstep or offend your beliefs.”
He’s a fast talker, overly confident in what he believes, and at the same time said he’s never pushed or pressured our daughter to believe his beliefs. All of which feels to me like a subtle move of Satan to deceive. He says his church never mentions Ellen G. White, and they don’t follow her. His pastor is a former Baptist—which I don’t understand.
I feel like I’m losing my daughter to this false concept because she loves this guy. I’m at my wits end! I have learned more about this church—which I believe is a cult—than I ever wanted to know!
How do you talk to someone who tries to assure you they don’t follow Ellen G. White and his church never mentions her? However, the 28 Fundamentals are on their website, but he says they’re just guidelines to be used so people just don’t believe what they want to.
That’s interesting, isn’t it? The 28 Fundamentals are also where you find Ellen G. White’s name identified as the “gift of prophecy”. But he kept saying his church doesn’t follow her, and they don’t either have or use her books.
I believe they still do, though, because they call themselves Seventh-day Adventists and because they believe the three things I mentioned above.
I’m so exhausted with this mess. She’s been seeing him for two years. She’s known from the beginning we were not on board with this relationship, and to be honest we’ve never had any issues with her until this.
We are praying diligently, but can you give us some any guidance? I’m trying to trust God, but right now I really feel defeated—especially after talking with him and seeing how he seems so confident in this unbiblical mess. Thank you so much for your help!
By the way, we are Baptist and have always been. My pastor’s wife, who is also my Sunday School teacher ,found you online and shared you with me. I’ve listened to two of your podcasts, and they were so helpful!
—VIA EMAIL
Response: Thank you for writing, and I am so, so sorry for what you are facing!
First, you are completely correct in your assessment. His denial of believing or using or mentioning EGW is a deception. The entire Adventist great controversy worldview which supports their fallible Jesus, Sabbath-keeping, and incomplete atonement is entirely from the writings of EGW. An Adventist would not have to consciously know or “believe” EGW to be deceived by the Adventist worldview, but that worldview comes ENTIRELY from her. The Bible on its own would never yield Adventism’s physicalist worldview.
This Adventist young man is completely typical: Adventists learn to defend Adventism to “never beens” by the fast use of proof-texts and arguments. They overwhelm people with glib words and lots of texts to show that what they believe is “in the Bible”, but they have no grasp of Scripture IN CONTEXT. They have a worldview that determines how they explain Scripture, and the worldview comes from their prophetess.
For him to brush off the fact that his church has the 28 Beliefs on its website and dismiss the significance that #18 is their central defense for their foundational source of biblical interpretation is 100% deception. He, likely, is so well-versed in how to do this verbal sleight-of-hand that he doesn’t think he is being deceptive—but he is.
The podcast is a really good resource. In fact, we now have two. Former Adventist Podcast has a large online library; Nikki Stevenson and I have been co-hosting it for four years. Have you found our series on the Adventist 28 Fundamental Beliefs? We go through each belief statement and use their insider book Seventh-day Adventists Believe to show how they hide their true understanding behind carefully-chosen words that the Christian world would not notice. You can find this series here, and I suggest that you peruse it and ask your daughter to listen as well:
Second, here is a link to the podcast I do weekly in which I discuss Adventism’s weekly Sabbath School lessons. The organization publishes a “Bible Study Guide” with daily lessons that are distributed to the entire world organization. Every member receives this Bible study guide for use in their weekly Sabbath Schools. Not all Adventists personally use these study guides, but these lessons teach and cement the Adventist worldview by apparently gong through Scripture to establish Adventist beliefs. For example, this quarter they are going through the gospel of John—not in order and not contextually, but they say that are going through John. Yet they ignore and suppress some of the most important parts of John’s gospel, allowing Adventists to continue to believe that Jesus does NOT share substance with the Father, that He was fallible, etc. In this podcast I attempt to show how the lesson suppresses the Scriptural truths in each week’s lesson series. You can find Former Adventist Fact Check here:
Third, here is an article that will help give you an overview of how the Adventist worldview differs from a biblical one. I suggest that you and your husband read this and also have your daughter read it:
You are in a truly difficult situation, and your daughter is in a serious danger that she does not understand. Adventism is not merely a wrong interpretation of Scripture; it is a counterfeit of Christianity that teaches a false gospel and has a false Jesus, an unbiblical trinity which is NOT One Being (although they might tell you that God is one being), but the organization actually believes that the “godhead” does not share substance and is what the prophetess called the “heavenly trio”. Adventism believes in an unbiblical view of the nature of man which denies that humans have an immaterial spirit that is born dead (Eph. 2:1–3) and must be born again. It denies that Jesus completed the atonement at the cross but says Jesus is in heaven completing the atonement in the investigative judgment, applying his blood to the confessed sins of believers as they remember to confess.
Finally, Adventism teaches that Satan, not Jesus, is the scapegoat described in Leviticus 16. On the authority of EGW, they teach that Jesus will place the confessed sins of the saved on Satan at the end of the investigative judgment, and Satan will bear them out of heaven to the lake of fire where he will bear the punishment for those sins. Thus Satan, not Jesus, is actually the final sin bearer—although they will not state that. But that is the function that they teach, and Adventists become very angry if people attempt to discuss the heresy of this belief.
They say that the seventh-day Sabbath will the final test of loyalty to God, and they say that when Jesus returns, only those keeping the seventh day will be saved.
I will give you the links to three more articles: two describe the central doctrine which Adventists try to hide from “outsiders”: the investigative judgment. One describes the official, classic version, and one describes the progressive way many Adventists have tried to reinterpret it to make it more palatable—yet denying the full atonement at the cross. The third article is one explaining (with quotes and citations) the Adventist doctrine of Satan as the scapegoat.
Finally, Although we are not currently publishing a printed version of Proclamation! magazine, all our back issues are online here: ProclamationMagazine.com.
We have also added your name to our weekly Proclamation! email updates. You may need to add the email address mail@LifeAssuranceMinistries.org to your contacts in order for the email not to be directed toward your Spam folder. These emails will arrive every Friday. Archived articles are available at https://blog.lifeassuranceministries.org/magazine-archive/.
You might also enjoy our YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/user/FormerAdventist/featured
Please feel free to email me anytime. Adventism is a demonic deception, and it is very, very hard to disentangle from it. I pray that your daughter will be open to the Lord and be willing to see what is wrong with Adventism. I assure you that if she marries this person, the dynamics will become much more difficult after marriage. Adventists viscerally believe their children must be brought up Adventist, and EGW said that God holds the parents responsible if the children are not Adventist.
I pray that He will give you guidance and insight. I suggest that your daughter delve into understanding what Adventist really is. Our website is a rich resource of articles, and our YouTube page is also a rich source of videos. Here, for example, is one of the articles we have addressing a similar situation in which a woman was engaged to an Adventist.
Please feel free to email anytime.
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